ADDRESS 



OF 



PRESIDENT WILSON 



AT THE 



CELEBRATION OF THE 

REDEDICATION OF 

CONGRESS HALL 



PHILADELPHIA, PA. 
OCTOBER 25, 1913 




WASHINGTON 
1916 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

Mf\R 2 5 1937 

DIV'^ICN OF DOCLi"EMTS 






ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 



[Delivered at Pliiladelpbla, Pa., on I lie ovrns'-on of the reded i cation of Congress 

Hall. Oct. Un, 1'J13.] 



Your Eonor, Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen : 

No American could stand in this place to-day and think of the cir- 
cumstances which we are come together to celebrate without being 
most profoundly stirred. There has come over me since I sat down 
here a sense of deep solemnity, because it has seemed to me that I saw 
ghosts crowding — a great assemblage of spirits, no longer visible, but 
whose influence we still feel as we feel the molding power of history 
itself. The men who sat in this hall, to whom we now look back with 
a touch of deep sentiment, were men of flesh and blood, face to face 
with extremely difficult problems. The population of the United 
States then was hardly three times the present population of the city 
of Philadelphia, and yet that was a Nation as this is a Nation, and 
the men who spoke for it were setting their hands to a work which 
was to last, not only that their people might be happy, but that an 
example might be lifted up for the instruction of the rest of the 
world. 

I like to read the quaint old accounts such as Mr. Day has read to 
us this afternoon. Strangers came then to America to see what the 
young people that had sprung up here were like, and they found men 
in counsel who knew how to construct governments. They found 
men deliberating here who had none of the appearance of novices, 
none of the hesitation of men who did not know whether the work 
they were doing was going to last or not; men who addressed them- 
selves to a problem of construction as familiarly as we attempt to 
carry out the traditions of a Government established these 137 years. 
I 'feel to-day the compulsion of these men, the compulsion of ex- 
amples which"^ were set up in this place. And of what do their 
examples remind us? They remind us not merely of public --:ervice 
but of public service shot through with principle and honor. They 
were not histrionic men. They did not say- 
Look upon us as upon those who shall hereafter be illustrious. 

They said : 

Look upon us who are doing the first free work of constitutional liberty In 
the world, and who must do it in soberness and truth, or it will not last. 

Politics, ladies and gentlemen, is made up in just about equal parts 
of comprehension and sympathy. No man ought to go into politics 
who does not comprehend the task that he is goin? to attack. He 

8 



4 CELEBRATION OF THE REDEDICATION OF CONGRESS HALL. 

may comprehend it so completel}' that it daunts him, that he doubts 
wliether his own spirit is stout enough and his own mind able enough 
to attempt its great undertakings, but unless he comprehend it he 
ought not to enter it. After he has comprehended it, there should 
come into his mind those profound impulses of sj'mpathy which con- 
nect him with the rest of mankind, for politics is a business of inter- 
pretation, and no men are fit for it who do not see and seek more than 
their own advantage and interest. 

We have stumbled upon many unhappy circumstances in the hun- 
dred years that have gone by since the event that we are celebrating. 
Almost all of them have come from self-centered men, men who saw 
in their own interest the interest of the country, and who did not 
have vision enough to road it in wider terms, in the universal terms 
of equity and justice and the rights of mankind. I hear a great 
many people at Fourth of July celebrations laud the Declaration of 
Indeixnidence who in between Julys shiver at the plain language of 
our bills of rights. The Declaration of Independence w^as, indeed, the 
first audible breath of liberty, but the substance of liberty is written 
in such documents as the declaration of rights attached, for example, 
to the first constitution of Virginia which was a model for the simi- 
lar documents read elsewhere into our great fundamental charters. 
That document speaks in very plain terms. The men of that genera- 
tion did not hesitate to say that every people has a right to choose 
its own forms of government — not once, but as often as it pleases — 
and to accommodate those forms of government to its existing inter- 
ests and circumstances. Not only to establish but to alter is the 
fundamental principle of self-government. 

We are just as much under compulsion to study the particular cir- 
cumstances of our own day as the gentlemen were who sat in this 
hall and set us precedents, not of what to do but of how to do it. 
Liberty inheres in the circumstances of the day. Human happiness 
consists in the life which human being are leading at the time that 
they live. I can feed my memory as happily upon the circumstances 
of the revolutionary and constitutional period as you can, but I can 
not feed all my purposes with them in Washington now. Every day 
problems arise which wear some new phase and aspect, and I must 
fall back, if I would serve my conscience, upon those things which 
are fundamental rather than upon those things which are super- 
ficial, and ask myself this question. How are you going to assist in 
some small part to give the American people and, by example, the 
peoples of the world more liberty, more happiness, more substantial 
prosperity; and how are you going to make that prosperity a common 
heritage instead of a selfish possession? I came here to-day partly in 
order to feed my own spirit. I did not come in compliment. When 
I was asked to come I knew immediately upon the utterance of the 
invitation that I had to come, that to be absent would be as if I 
refused to drink once more at the original fountains of inspiration 
for our own Government. 

The men of the day whicli we now celebrate had a very areat 
advantage over us, ladies and gentlemen, in this one particular : Life 
was simple in America then. All men shared the same circumstances 
in almost equal degree. We think of Washington, for example, as 
an aristocrat, as a man separated by training, separated by family 



CELEBRATION OF THE REDEDICATION OF CONGRESS HALL. 5 

and neighborhood tradition, from the ordinary people of the rank 
and file of the country. Have you forgotten the personal history of 
George Washington? Do you not know that he struggled as poor 
boys now struggle for a meager and imperfect education; that he 
worked at his surveyor's tasks in the lonely forests; that he knew all 
the roughness, all the hardships, all the adventure, all the variety 
of the common life of that day; and that if he stood a little stilliy 
in this place, if he looked a little aloof, it was because life had dealt 
hardly with him? All his sinews had been stiffened by the rough 
work of making America. He was a man of the people, whose touch 
had been with them since the day he saw the light first in the old 
Dominion of Virginia. And the men who came after him, men. 
some of whom had drunk deep at the sources of philosophy and or 
study, w^ere, nevertheless, also men who on this side of the water 
knew no complicated life but the simple life of primitive neighbor- 
hoods. Our task is very much more difficult. That sympathy which 
alone interprets public duty is more difficult for a public man to 
acquire now than it was then, because we live in the midst of circum- 
stances and conditions infinitely complex. 

No man can boast that he understands America. No man can boast 
that he has lived the life of America, as almost every man who sat 
in this hall in those days could boast. No man can pretend that 
except by common counsel he can gather into his consciousness what 
the varied life of this people is. The duty that we have to keep open 
eyes and open hearts and accessible understandings is a very much 
more difficult duty to perform than it was in their day. Yet how 
much more important that it should be performed, for fear we make 
infinite and irreparable blunders. The city of Washington is in 
some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the 
rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate 
circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its 
offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the 
Potomac and then out into Virginia and on to the heavens themselves, 
and that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and re- 
inember the United States. Not that I would intimate that all of 
the United States lies south of Washington, but there is a serious 
thing back of my thought. If you think too much about being 
reelected, it is very difficult to be worth reelecting. You are so apt 
to forget that the comparatively small number of persons, numerous 
as they seem to be when they swarm, who come to Washington to 
ask for things, do not constitute an important proportion of the 
population of the country, that it is constantly necessary to come 
away from Washington and renew one's contact with the people who 
do not swarm there, who do not ask for anything, but who do trust 
you without their personal counsel to do your duty. Unless a man 
gets these contacts he grows weaker and weaker. He needs them as 
Hercules needed the touch of mother earth. If you lift him up 
too high or he lifts himself too high, he loses the contact and therefore 
loses the inspiration. 

I love to think of those plain men, however far from plam their 
dress sometimes was, who assembled in this hall. One is startled to 
think of the variety of costume and color Avhich would now occur if 
we were let loose upon the fashions of that age. Men's lack of taste 



6 CELEBRATION OF THE REDEDICATION OF CONGRESS HALL. 

is largely concealed now by the limitations of fashion. Yet these 
men. who sometimes dressed lil^e the peacock, were, nevertheless, of 
the ordinary flight of tlieir time. They were birds of a feather; they 
were birds come from a very simple breeding; they were much in the 
open heaven. They were beginning, when there was so little to dis- 
tract their attention, to show that they could live upon fundamental 
principles of government. We talk those principles, but we have not 
time to absorb them. We have not time to let them into our blood, 
and thence have them translated into the plain mandates of action. 
The very smallness of this room, the very simplicity of it all, all 
the suggestions which come from its restoration, are reassuring 
things — things which it becomes a man to realize. Therefore my 
theme here to-day, my only thought, is a very simple one. Do 
not let ns go back to the annals of those sessions of Congress to 
find out Avhat to do, because we live in another age and the circum- 
stances are absolutely different; but let us be men of that kind; let 
lis feel at every turn the compulsions of principle and of honor 
which thy felt; let us free our vision from temporary circumstances 
and look abroad at the horizon and take into our lungs the great 
air of freedom which has blown through this country and stolen 
across the seas and blessed people everywhere; and, looking east 
and west and north and south, let us remind ourselves that we are 
the custodians, in some degree, of the principles which have made 
men free and governments just. 

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